Why We Can't All Just Get Along

Stanley Fish

Whenever I teach Paradise Lost, the hardest thing to get across
is that God is God. Students invariably (one is tempted to say
"naturally") fall in with the view declared by William Empson in
Milton's God when he says that "all the characters are
on trial in any civilized narrative." In Milton's narrative, of course,
God is a central character, and the entire story gets going, Empson
observes, when Satan "doubts his credentials." Empson analogizes the
situation to that "of a Professor doubting the credentials of his Vice-
Chancellor," and remarks with some sarcasm that "such a man would not be
pursued with infinite malignity into eternal torture, but given evidence
which put the credentials beyond doubt."

In this account of the matter, "civilization" and "evidence" go together
and dictate our chief responsibility as readers-which is, Empson says,
"to use our judgment about the characters." It is also the obligation of
the characters in the story, and the fact that they perform it
differently is what gives the plot its energy: the loyalist Abdiel,
Empson observes, tells Satan and his rebel followers "that God should be
obeyed because he is good, and they deny that he is good," and as far as
Empson is concerned, they have good reason to do so. Actually the scene
Empson is remembering is somewhat more complex. When Abdiel rises,
"Among the faithless, faithful only he" (V, 897), what he says is not
that God is good (which would imply a conclusion reached by submitting
God's actions to the judgment of independent criteria). Rather he says
that God is God, which implies that even to put God to such an
evidentiary test would be a category mistake-how can you give a grade to
the agent whose person defines and embodies value?-that would constitute
the gravest of sins, whether one calls it impiety ("Cease . . . this
impious rage"), self-worship, or simply pride.

What Abdiel says is: "Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute /
With him the points of liberty, who made / Thee what thou art?" (V, 822-
24a) Earlier Satan had justified his rebellion by invoking freedom and
liberty; Abdiel now points out that these terms have no weight when the
agent from whom you would be free made and sustains you. Satan in turn
finds this argument preposterous and replies to it with a classic
statement of rational empiricism:

That we were form'd . . . say'st thou?
. . . strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt:
who saw
When this creation was? remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd.
(V, 853, 855-60)

This is the philosophy of the man from Missouri: show me, seeing is
believing, and since no one, including you, has seen the moment of his
creation, I don't believe in it. There is nothing in the present scene
or in my experience that leads me inescapably to the conclusion you
urge. Where did you ever get this absurd notion? What's your proof?
("Doctrine which we would know whence learnt?") I must have made myself.

Satan's way of thinking is contrasted directly in the poem with Adam's.
Recalling the moment not of his creation, but just after his creation,
Adam reports "Myself I . . . perused . . . limb by limb" and found that
I could speak and name, "But who I was, or where, or from what cause /
Knew not" (VIII, 267, 270-71). Like Satan, Adam knows no time before he
was what he now is, but he gives a quite different answer to the
question he immediately poses: "how came I thus, how here? / Not of
myself, by some great maker then / In goodness and in power preeminent"
(VIII, 277b-79). The goodness and power for which Satan seeks
independent evidence is here assumed by Adam; and once the assumption is
in place it generates a program for action and a life-project: "how may
I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live?"
(VIII, 280-1)

I t might seem that in presenting these two moments in Paradise
Lost, I am placing in opposition two ways of knowing, one by
evidence and reason, the other by faith. But in fact on the level of
epistemology both are the same. Satan and Adam begin alike from a point
of ignorance-they know nothing prior to (the precise word is "before")
the perspective they currently occupy; and the direction each then takes
from this acknowledged limitation follows with equal logic or illogic.
Adam reasons, since I don't remember how I got here, I must have been
made by someone. Satan reasons, since I don't know how I got here, I
must have made myself, or as we might say today, I must have just
emerged from the primeval slime.

In neither case does the conclusion follow necessarily from the observed
fact of imperfect knowledge. In both cases something is missing, a first
premise, and in both cases reasoning can't get started until a first
premise is put in place. What's more, since the first premise is what is
missing, it cannot be derived from anything in the visible scene; it is
what must be imported-on no evidentiary basis whatsoever-so that the
visible scene, the things of this world, can acquire the
meaning and significance they will now have. There is no opposition here
between knowledge by reason and knowledge by faith because Satan and
Adam are committed to both simultaneously. Each performs an act of
faith-the one in God and the other in materialism-and then each begins
to reason in ways dictated by the content of his faith.

That is why each performs as he does when confronted with a new (or
apparently new) situation. When Eve worries that the growth of the
garden will overwhelm the unfallen couple's efforts and prevent them
from carrying out their assigned task, Adam replies by reasoning
against the evidence of empirical circumstances and declaring
that however things might seem, God, preeminent in goodness and power,
will provide: "These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands /
Will keep from Wilderness with ease" (IX, 244-45a), a confidence
unsupported by anything either of them sees. Satan, on the other hand,
rather than beginning from the first premise of a benevolent and
provident God, has as his first premise the radical contingency of
outcomes. In a world ruled by chance and opportunity, the world in which
he can emerge, as it were, out of nothing, who knows what the next turn
of fortune's wheel might bring? Perhaps God will nod or make a misstep;
after all, Satan reasons, on the evening of the first day of the war in
heaven, God has thrown everything he has at us and we're still standing;
we "have sustain'd one day in doubtful fight, / And if one day, why not
Eternal days?" (VI, 423-4)

"If one day, why not eternal days?" has exactly the same structure as "I
wasn't witness to my creation, therefore it didn't happen." In both
instances, there is a refusal-no, an inability-to conceive of
possibilities not already included in the field of empirical vision, the
evidence of things seen. The habit of identifying the limits of reality
with the limits of his own horizons defines Satan-it makes him what he
is and is everywhere on display. Listen, for example, to his earlier
rehearsal of the strategy he will employ in the actual temptation. He
has heard Adam and Eve in conversation and found out about the forbidden
fruit and the penalty attached to eating it, and he exclaims to himself:

O fair foundation laid whereon to build
Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds
With more desire to know, and to reject
Envious commands, invented with design
To keep them low whom knowledge might
exalt
Equal with Gods; aspiring to be such,
They taste and die: what likelier can ensue?
(IV, 521-27)

That is to say: God has set the conditions of their lives; if they
violate those conditions they will die. I will get them to eat the
apple, and they will die. What else could happen? What else could happen
is that the apparently iron logic of God's justice-he says at one point
of Adam, "die he or justice must"-can be broken by the exercise of his
mercy, which, he has said, "first and last will brightest shine" (III,
134). The idea of mercy is literally unthinkable by Satan, who can only
imagine agents with motives and goals just like his. He certainly cannot
imagine an agent who would contrive to circumvent the force of his own
decree and who would do so by paying himself the price his own law
exacts. It is not a thought Satan could entertain because the
very structure of his consciousness-grounded in self-worship and
selfishness-excludes it as a possible insight.

I make the point strongly because it is so alien to the modern liberal-
enlightenment picture of cognitive activity in which the mind is
conceived of as a calculating and assessing machine that is open to all
thoughts and closed to none. In this picture the mind is in an important
sense not yet settled; and indeed settling, in the form of a fixed
commitment to an idea or a value, is a sign of cognitive and moral
infirmity. Milton's view is exactly the reverse: in the absence of a
fixed commitment-of a first premise that cannot be the object of thought
because it is the enabling condition of thought-cognitive activity
cannot get started. One's consciousness must be grounded in an originary
act of faith-a stipulation of basic value-from which determinations of
right and wrong, relevant and irrelevant, real and unreal, will then
follow.

For the modern liberal, beliefs are what the mind scrutinizes and judges
by rational criteria that are themselves hostage to no belief in
particular; for Milton, beliefs-in God or in oneself or in the absolute
contingency of material circumstances-are the content of a rationality
that cannot scrutinize them because it rests on them. Milton's motto is
not "seeing is believing," but "believing is seeing"; and since what you
see marks the boundaries of your knowledge, believing is also knowing;
and since it is on the basis of what you know-whether what you know is
that there is a God or that there isn't one-that you act, believing is
acting. What you believe is what you see is what you know is what you do
is what you are.

It is a tenet of liberal enlightenment faith that belief and knowledge
are distinct and separable and that even if you do not embrace a point
of view you can still understand it. This is the credo Satan announces
in Paradise Regained when he says "most men admire / Virtue,
who follow not her lore." That is, it is always possible to appreciate a
way of life that is not yours. Milton would respond that unless the way
of life is yours, you have no understanding of it, and that is why, he
declares in another place, that a man who would write a true poem must
himself be a true poem and can only praise or even recognize worthy
things if he is himself worthy.

In this, as in so much else, Milton follows Augustine. Repeatedly in his
On Christian Doctrine, Augustine begins a sentence by
declaring, "No one would be so stupid as to say" or "It is obviously
absurd to assert" or "It is utter madness to believe" or "No reasonable
person would believe in any circumstances that. . . ." What invariably
follows, however, is an assertion that has been found reasonable by
millions, and one wonders what Augustine means by a "reasonable person."
The answer is that a reasonable person is a person who believes what
Augustine believes and who, like Augustine, can only hear assertions
contrary to that belief as absurd.

Moreover, the belief whose prior assumption determines what will be
heard as reasonable is not itself subject to the test of reasonableness.
Reason's chain does not ratify it, but proceeds from it. After all,
Augustine explains, the logical validity of a chain of inference is
independent of the validity or nonvalidity of the proposition with which
the chain begins: "Correct inferences may be made concerning false as
well as true propositions." It follows that a conclusion reached will be
really-as opposed to formally-true only if a true proposition anchors
it, and "the truth of a proposition is inherent in itself"; that is, its
truth cannot be established by some procedure to which it must submit. A
reasonable mind, then, is a mind closed to the possibility that certain
basic propositions-Augustine's example is "Christ is risen"-could be
questioned. A reasonable mind is a mind that refuses to be open.

Of course an open mind, a mind ready at any moment to jettison even its
most cherished convictions, is the very definition of "reasonable" in a
post-Enlightenment liberal culture; and in the ears of those who have
been socialized into that culture, a position like Augustine's will have
the sound of obvious irrationality. That is certainly how John Stuart
Mill, with whom Milton is often linked, incorrectly, as a precursor of
modern thought, hears it. For the Mill of On Liberty, what "no
reasonable person would believe" is that the highest value is the value
of obedience. Mill is incredulous before a philosophy according to which
"all the good of which humanity is capable is comprised by obedience,"
and he is aghast at an ethics that requires nothing of man but "the
surrendering of himself to the will of God." He thinks it barbarous that
Christians hold obstinately to an article of faith and then "stigmatize
those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men." That is no
way, he complains, to know the truth, which can be known only "by
hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of
opinion." It is a man's obligation to keep "his mind open to criticism
on his opinions" and "to listen to all that could be said against him."
He must strike the stance not of the "impassioned partisan," but of "the
calmer and more interested bystander" who exercises his "judicial
faculty" and sits "in intelligent judgment." The duty of the reasonable
man is to be tolerant of all views, and he identifies intolerance with
religious thought, for "in the minds of almost all religious persons . .
. the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves"; that is, with
the reserve of whatever position they hold sacred. It is
intolerance that leads Christians to "teach infidels to be just
to Christianity" while they themselves show no disposition to be "just
to infidelity."

One wonders how Mill could have written these words without some sense
of how oddly they sound: be just to infidelity, that is, to
error, apostasy, evil? What could he possibly mean? In fact what he
means depends on not taking the word "infidelity" seriously, that is, as
a value judgement. As Mill uses it, "infidelity" is simply the name of
an opinion, a point of view to which we are to accord the respect due
all points of view. It is neither true nor false, good nor evil; it is
rather one vendor in a marketplace whose business-a business never, by
definition, concluded-it is to separate out the truths from the
falsehoods, a process that cannot be fairly conducted, Mill would say,
if a particular point of view-for example, "Christ is not
risen"-is stigmatized in advance. The trouble with Christianity, and
with any religion grounded in unshakable convictions, is that it lacks
the generosity necessary to the marketplace's full functioning.
Christianity, Mill declares, in what he takes to be a devastating
judgment, is "one-sided," that is, insistent upon the rightness of its
perspective and deaf to the perspectives that might challenge it.

I am hardly the first to observe that Mill's position contains its own
difficulties and internal inconsistencies. The imperative of keeping the
marketplace of ideas open means that some ideas-those urged with an
unhappy exclusiveness-must either themselves be excluded or be admitted
only on the condition that they blunt the edge of their assertiveness,
and present themselves for possible correction. Willmoore Kendall asks,
if a society is dedicated, as Mill urges that it be, to "a national
religion of skepticism, to the suspension of judgment as the
exercise of judgment par excellence," what can it say to a man who urges
an opinion "not predicated on that view," a man who "with every
syllable of faith he utters, challenges the very foundations of
skeptical society"? To such a man, Kendall answers, the society can only
say, "You cannot enter into our discussions." "The all-questions-are-
open-questions society," he concludes, cannot "practice tolerance toward
those who disagree with it"; those "it must persecute-and so on its very
own showing, arrest the pursuit of truth."

This is a very powerful argument, and one to which I shall return, but
it is not the argument I will finally want to stress, because to use it
as a weapon against the doctrine of liberal toleration is to win a
debating point but concede the larger point by accepting toleration as
the final measure of judgment. If you persuade liberalism that its
dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its
own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at
liberalism's table where before you were denied an invitation; but it
will still be liberalism's table that you are sitting at, and
the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers. That is, someone
will now turn and ask, "Well, what does religion have to say about this
question?" And when, as often will be the case, religion's answer is
doctrinaire (what else could it be?), the moderator (a title deeply
revealing) will nod politely and turn to someone who is presumed to be
more reasonable. To put the matter baldly, a person of religious
conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas but to shut
it down, at least insofar as it presumes to determine matters that he
believes have been determined by God and faith. The religious person
should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout
it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch.

Liberals, on the other hand, need not be so aggressive (although they
will always be passive-aggressive) since the field, as it is presently
demarcated, is already theirs. That is why Martha Nussbaum, in a recent
piece in the New York Review of Books, feels that, in order to
discredit him, she need only quote Michael McConnell when he argues for
a notion of truth that has reference to "authority, community, and
faith." Someone who would link truth to concepts of authority and faith-
the equivalents of Mill's hated "obedience"-is obviously beyond the pale
and constitutes a danger, or so Nussbaum asserts, to "the very norms of
academic freedom and academic objectivity." McConnell, Professor of Law
at the University of Chicago, is among the most vocal of those who have
been challenging the domestication and trivializing of the religious
sensibility, but a reading of the article Nussbaum cites ("God Is Dead
and We Have Killed Him: Freedom of Religion in the Post-Modern Age,"
Brigham Young University Law Review, Winter 1993) suggests that he
poses no danger at all.

McConnell begins by examining a brief filed by Robert Abrams, former
Attorney General of the State of New York, in defense of a ruling that
refused a religious group the use of a public meeting room for the
showing of a film. Noting that the Attorney General grounds his position
in a characterization of religious experience as "inviolately private"
and therefore out of place in a public forum, McConnell angrily declares
it "inconceivable that a public official would say that about any other
worldview": "If feminists, gay rights advocates, Afrocentrists, or even
secular conservatives tried to communicate their ideas . . . to the
public Abrams would never say they should keep their ideas to
themselves." In an age, McConnell observes, "when previously
marginalized voices are welcomed to the public dialogue," only religion
is "privatized and marginalized" and "must be kept under wraps."

McConnell is here making two points which he thinks go together, but
which in fact are finally in tension with one another. The first point
is that a religion privatized to the extent that the world is kept
quarantined from its potential influence is a religion not taken
seriously. In his Areopagitica Milton pokes some high literary
fun at a man who, uncomfortable with the sharp demands placed on him by
religious faith, decides to hand his religious obligation over to a
hired agent who will, for a fee, breathe out the appropriate prayers and
perform the required acts of piety. This surrogate is well paid and
provided for, "is liberally supped and sumptuously laid to sleep," and
after having been "better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite
would gladly have fed on free figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, walks
abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all
day without his religion." Milton's scorn at this picture of a faith
held so lightly that it leaves the everyday world unaltered is matched
by McConnell's distress at a public/private split that assures the same
lack of practical efficacy: a religion deprived of the opportunity to
transform the culture in its every detail is hardly a religion at all.

But McConnell immediately allows this point to be swallowed up by
another, by the debating point I have already identified: this exclusion
of the religious impulse from the public sphere runs contrary to the
professed liberality of an open society. "In an open society, we presume
that the uninhibited, robust, and wide-open exchange of viewpoints
benefits us all."

The key to what is happening here is the fact that the phrase
"uninhibited, robust, and wide open" comes from New York Times v.
Sullivan, a 1964 case in which the Supreme Court dislodged from its
position of primacy in libel matters the standard of truthfulness. In
place of truth, the Court substituted the standard of free-for-all
debate in relation to which false and defamatory statements are on a par
with true and accurate statements, on the deeply skeptical reasoning
that both alike are opinions: "Erroneous statement is inevitable in free
debate, and . . . must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to
have the 'breathing space' " they need; and "this is true even though
the utterance contains 'half-truths' and 'misinformation.' " In this and
other passages, the court privileges expression as a value over the
substantive worth and veracity of that which is expressed.

Religious discourse, however, cannot be unconcerned with the substantive
worth and veracity of its assertions, which are in fact presupposed, and
presupposed too is the urgency of proclaiming those assertions-
the good news-to a world asked to receive them as the whole and
necessary truth. The ethos of New York Times v. Sullivan is
finally inimical to the religious impulse, which does not value talk for
its own sake, but values the end-spiritual regeneration leading to
regenerate action-to which some, but not all, forms of talk may bring
us.

By couching his brief for religious expression in the terms of free
speech doctrine, McConnell falls in with the very trivializing of
religious expression he deplores, for under a New York Times v.
Sullivan standard, religious expression is just one more voice in a
mix that refuses the claim of any particular voice to be prior and
controlling. When McConnell characterizes his own essay as a "plea for
old fashioned broadmindedness"-that is for toleration-he seems not to
realize that broadmindedness is the opposite of what religious
conviction enacts and requires. Religious conviction, as Mill sees from
the enemy position, requires narrowmindedness, the discovery of and
hewing to the straight and narrow way. Broadmindedness is what
liberalism requires and, by invoking it as a standard,
McConnell gives the game away to his opponents.

He does it again when he unmasks the liberal claim of neutrality.
"Liberal neutrality," he complains, "is of a very peculiar sort," for it
defines "neutral" so that it means "secular"-neutrality between
"conceptions of the good life" so long as they are not God-centered, "as
if agnosticism about the theistic foundations of the universe were
common ground among believers and nonbelievers alike." Since this
neutrality has no obligation to the theism it does not recognize except
as a negative limit-case, theism will lose out when the supposedly
neutral state weighs its claims. "Virtually any plausible public
purpose," McConnell laments, is "deemed sufficient to override the right
of religious exercise." The result is the "strange phenomenon" of a
liberalism that "proclaims its neutrality toward competing ideals of
virtue . . . but is committed in practice to the promotion of particular
ideals and-even more-to the eradication of others." By marginalizing
religious ideals, liberalism has failed to live up to its own ideal. The
trouble with liberalism is that it is not liberal enough.

Here again is the familiar debating point, but it is itself
beside the point; for what McConnell describes is not a
liberalism enmeshed in self-contradiction, but a liberalism being
perfectly true to its principles, a liberalism that is neutral in the
only way it could be and still remain liberal. McConnell's mistake (one
he shares with many liberals) is to think that liberal neutrality is, or
should be, pure, a practice of making no a priori substantive judgments
at all. But liberalism rests on the substantive judgment that the public
sphere must be insulated from viewpoints that owe their allegiance not
to its procedures-to the unfettered operation of the marketplace of
ideas-but to the truths they work to establish. That is what neutrality
means in the context of liberalism-a continual pushing away of
orthodoxies, of beliefs not open to inquiry and correction-and that is
why, in the name of neutrality, religious propositions must either be
excluded from the marketplace or admitted only in ceremonial forms, in
the form, for example, of a prayer that opens a session of Congress in
which the proposals of religion will not be given a serious hearing.

McConnell's true antagonist, then, is not a liberalism gone sour, but
liberalism, pure and simple; and his request that liberalism become more
liberal-open itself up to forces that do not place openness in the
position of highest value-will be resisted because for liberalism to
accede to it would be tantamount to committing suicide. What McConnell
should want is not an expansion of the marketplace of ideas, but its
disbanding and replacement by a regime of virtue as opposed to a regime
of process. He should want an end to the public/private split which, by
fencing off the arena of political dispute from substantive
determinations of value, assures the continual deferral and bracketing
of value questions. He should want what Milton wants, a unified
conception of life in which the pressure of first principles is felt and
responded to twenty-four hours a day.

But so far is McConnell from recognizing the shape of his own interests
as a committed Christian that he ends his essay by declaring that "the
public/ private distinction . . . is utterly indispensable to a theory
of religious freedom. We cannot have religious freedom without it." One
knows what he means: without the public/private split religion will not
be protected from state action; were the state not barred from
interfering with the free exercise of religion, that freedom might
disappear. But of course the freedom thus gained is the freedom to be
ineffectual, the freedom "to be confined to the margins of public life-
to those areas not important enough to have received the helping or
controlling hand of government."

What is not allowed religion under the private public distinction is the
freedom to win, the freedom not to be separate from the state,
but to inform and shape its every action. That idea never even occurs to
McConnell because it is so antiliberal and in the end a liberal is what
he is. "From a secular point of view," he writes, "it is difficult to
appreciate the religious impulse." His essay is a testimony to that
difficulty, which registers even here in the use of the word
"appreciate," a word borrowed from the vocabulary of taste, a word that
falls far short of taking the measure of what the religious impulse,
fully felt, might be like.

The same failure characterizes Stephen Carter's The Culture of
Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious
Devotion (1993), a book that begins by calling religion a "very
subversive force," and ends by diluting that force in a theory of
accommodation. There are more than a few places where Carter seems to
understand that from a secular point of view it is not merely
"difficult" but impossible to appreciate the religious impulse. Early on
he notes that the invocation of a common rationality (in the manner of a
Thomas Nagel or Bruce Ackerman) is a device for limiting the
conversation to premises that would "exclude religion from the mix,"
since, invariably, the "common rationality" will stigmatize as
"irrational" the strong claims of religious persons. He also sees that
to ask a religious person to rephrase his claims in more mainstream
terms is to ask that person to cut himself off from the very source of
his conviction and to become in effect the opposite of what he is, to
become secular: "The proposed rules to govern discourse in the public
square require some members of society to remake themselves before they
are allowed to press policy arguments." And at his strongest he points
out that the fact-value distinction, which allows theorists to bracket
off a public sphere whose deliberations are procedural rather than
substantive, is itself a substantive stipulation that has the effect of
prejudging what will and will not be considered a fact.

"Liberal epistemology," Carter explains, "is not capable of treating as
a factual inquiry a question like 'Can the Jehovah's Witness achieve
salvation after receiving a blood transfusion?'-or for that matter, a
question like, 'Is there life after death?' " The liberal response would
be, of course not: facts are what is verifiable by independent evidence;
questions of salvation and life after death are matters of faith. But of
course they are both matters of faith, for, as Carter points out, the
establishment of a fact depends on "what counts as evidence."

That is to say, evidence is never independent in the sense of being
immediately perspicuous; evidence comes into view (or doesn't) in the
light of some first premise or "essential axiom" that cannot itself be
put to the test because the protocols of testing are established by its
pre-assumed authority. A "creationist parent whose child is being taught
. . . evolution" protests not in the name of religion and against the
witness of fact; he protests in the name of fact as it seems
indisputable to him given the "central" truth "that God is real." Given
such a "starting point and the methodology" that follows from it,
"creationism is as rational an explanation as any other"; or rather (it
is the same point from the other direction), given the starting point of
a material world that caused itself-the Satanic starting point-evolution
is as faith-dependent an explanation as any other. This is not to debunk
rationality in favor of faith, but to say that rationality and faith go
together in an indissoluble package: you can't have one without the
other.

Taken to its conclusions this argument is devastating for the liberal
project. For it is only if rationality and faith can be separated that
one can establish a public sphere in which issues of civic concern can
be discussed by persons who have left their religious convictions at
home or checked them at the door. If you can't have one without the
other, behind any dispute that occurs will be a conflict of conviction
that cannot be rationally settled because it is also and necessarily a
conflict of rationalities, and when there is a conflict of
rationalities, your only recourse is, well, to conflict since there is
no common ground in relation to which dialogue might proceed. Here looms
the specter of liberalism's collapse, but Carter will not look it in the
face, and in the last part of his book he puts asunder what he had
previously joined.

He does this by insisting on a distinction between disagreeing, say,
with the religious right or with David Koresh because their positions
are "wrong" and disagreeing with them because their positions are
presented in religious terms.

If the Christian right is wrong for America, it
must be because its message is wrong on the issues, not
because its message is religious. . . . We must be able, in
our secular society, to distinguish a critique of the
content of a belief from a critique of the content of a
belief from a critique of its source.

What is remarkable about these statements is that they subscribe fully
to the liberal assumptions that have been the object of Carter's
critique. Suddenly rationality and faith and, along with them, fact and
value can be separated, and with separation returns the liberal
public sphere and the possibility of assessing agendas without inquiring
into the worldviews from which they emerge. As Carter uses the phrase,
"wrong on the issues" can only mean wrong on the issues as they are
identified apart from anyone's religious convictions; but this assumes
that the specification of what the issues in fact are can be
made uncontroversially. But as Carter himself has argued (when, for
example, he points out that in the mind of a creationist parent, his
"child is being taught a pack of lies") the reverse is true: in the
bitterest debates, it is the very shape of the issues that is in
dispute, and what ultimately fuels the dispute, and renders it incapable
of resolution, are the incompatible first assumptions-articles of
opposing faiths-in the different lights of which the issue takes form.

A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against a God who infuses
life at the moment of conception; a pro-choice advocate sees abortion as
a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as
to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs. No conversation
between them can ever get started because each of them starts from a
different place and they could never agree as to what they were
conversing about. A pro-lifer starts from a belief in the
direct agency of a personal God and this belief, this religious
conviction, is not incidental to his position; it is his
position, and determines its features in all their detail. The "content
of a belief" is a function of its source, and the critique of
one will always be the critique of the other. Of course we can and do
say, "I don't care where you got that idea from; it's wrong." But what
we mean is that we can't see where such an idea came from, and we can't
see that because the place it came from is not one where we have ever
been; it is the place, the source, we object to even when we fail-we
could hardly succeed and be ourselves-to recognize it.

One understands why Carter wants to separate the message from its
source: he is bothered by the fact that liberals tend to dismiss certain
views just because they are motivated by religious conviction. But when
he urges that we bracket the conviction and attend just to the view, he
does exactly what he inveighs against: he asks religious persons to
"remake themselves before they can legitimately be involved in secular
political argument," or, rather, he invites us to remake them when he
urges that we receive them respectfully so long as their arguments can
be made sense of in secular terms.

When he counsels us to reject Patrick Buchanan's views on the merits and
not because they come provided with a "religious justification," he is
producing one more example of "how American law and politics trivialize
religious devotion." Religious devotion is trivialized when its words
are admitted into the forum, but its claims to be not just one truth but
the truth are disallowed. This "accommodation," as Carter calls it, is
the very program of liberalism that will always "accommodate" religious
doctrine so as to avoid taking it seriously. Accommodation is a much
better strategy than outright condemnation, for it keeps the enemy in
sight while depriving it of the (exclusionary) edge that makes it truly
dangerous; and best of all, one who accommodates can perform this
literally disarming act while proclaiming the most high-sounding
pieties.

It is the history of this killing of religion by kindness that is the
great subject of George Marsden's The Soul of the American
University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief
(1994). The book begins with a question-"How was it that distinctively
Christian teaching could be displaced so easily from the substantive
role that it held in American higher education for over two centuries
and in the universities of Christendom for many centuries before that?"-
and then proceeds to answer it in twenty-two closely reasoned and
densely packed chapters.

The answer has many components, including the Jeffersonian project of
softening sectarian aggressiveness and establishing a general religion
of peace, reason, and morality, the identification of common sense
philosophy with Christian morality within the assumption that each
supported the other, the rise of the cult of the expert whose skills and
authority were independent of his character or religious faith, and the
substitution for the imperative of adhering to an already-revealed truth
the imperative of continuing to search for a truth whose full emergence
is located in an ever-receding future.

This last was particularly important because if truth was by definition
larger and more inclusive than our present horizons declared it to be,
obedience to traditional norms and values was no longer a virtue, but a
fault, and a moral fault at that.

The higher truth was an ever progressing ideal
toward which the human community . . . always moved, yet
never reached. Since truth was by definition always
changing, the only thing ultimately sacred was the means of
pursuing it. No religious or other dogmatic claim could be
allowed to stand in its way.

It is not the business of a university, declared Charles Eliot of
Harvard, "to train men for those functions in which implicit obedience
is of the first importance. On the contrary, it should train men for
those occupations in which self-government, independence, and
originating power are preeminently needed." (Or, in Satan's more
succinct formulation, "self-begot, self-raised.")

As Marsden is quick to note, "Freedom was the principle that tied
everything else together." If it is assumed, as it was by many, that the
truth to which free inquiry is leading us is the same truth that
religion names "God," then, as one cleric put it, "the cause of Christ
and the Church is advanced by whatever liberalizes and enriches and
enlarges the mind." The more capacious and inclusive the individual
consciousness, the closer one is to comprehending the life-principle or
soul of the universe. "Hence," Marsden concludes, "any entirely free and
honest inquiry into any dimension of reality simply was part of
true religion."

The only thing excluded, then, was exclusion itself; that is, any
position that refused to submit its basic premises to reason's scrutiny.
Princeton's Francis Patton declared that "the rationality or rather the
reasonableness of a belief is the condition of its credibility." That
is, you believe it because reason ratifies it, a view Augustine would
have heard with horror, one that John Webster, writing in 1654, rejects
as obviously absurd. "But if man gave his assent unto, or believed the
things of Christ . . . because they appear probable . . . to his reason,
then would his faith be . . . upon the rotten basis of human authority."
By the end of the nineteenth century, human authority has been put in
the place of revelation; or rather human authority, now identified with
the progressive illumination afforded by reason, has become the vehicle
of revelation and of a religion that can do very nicely without any
strong conception of personal deity.

Of course, this process by which an ethic of free inquiry supplants and
liberalizes an older ethic of obedience to settled truth was not without
opposition, and Marsden duly records the voices that were raised in
protest. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Yale's Noah
Porter scoffed at the supposed neutrality and evenhandedness of secular
educational theory, which, he pointed out, was its theology: "The
question is not whether the college shall or shall not teach theology,
but what theology it shall teach-theology according to . . . Moses and
Paul or according to Buckle and Draper." By the beginning of this
century it was all too evident which of these directions had been taken
by American education. In tones recently echoed by conservative
polemicists, the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine complained in
1909 that

In hundreds of classrooms it is being taught
daily that the decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus;
that the home as an institution is doomed; that there are no
absolute evils . . . that the change of one religion to
another is like getting a new hat; that moral precepts are
passing shibboleths; that conceptions of right and wrong are
as unstable as styles of dress.

"The neutrality we have," thundered William Jennings Bryan in 1923, "is
often but a sham; it carefully excludes the Christian religion but
permits the use of the schoolroom for the destruction of faith and for
the teaching of materialistic doctrines." From a quite different
perspective, Walter Lippmann agreed: "Reason and free inquiry can be
neutral and tolerant only of those opinions which submit to the test of
reason and free inquiry." What this means, as Marsden points out, is
that "two irreconcilable views of truth and education were at issue";
but of course the issue was never really joined, because the liberal
establishment thought of itself as already reconciled to everything and
anything and therefore was unable to see how exclusionary its policy of
radical inclusion really was: "Groups that were excluded, such as
Marxists and fundamentalists, often raised the point that they were
being excluded by liberal dogmatism, but they were seldom heard."

That they were not heard is hardly surprising, since what they were
saying was that a state of "warfare" existed, and warfare-deep conflict
over basic and nonnegotiable issues-was precisely what
liberalism was invented to deny; and it manages that denial by excluding
from the tolerance it preaches anyone who will not pledge allegiance to
the mimicry of tolerance.

This then is the story Marsden tells, and he tells it with a
dispassionate equanimity that sits oddly with the strong point of view
he announces in his introduction. "My point of view," he declares, "is
that of a fairly traditional Protestant of the reformed theological
heritage. One of the features of that heritage is that it has valued
education that relates faith to one's scholarship. Particularly
important is that beliefs about God, God's creation, and God's will . .
. should have impact on scholarship not just in theology, but also in
considering other dimensions of human thought and relationships." But in
the long narrative that follows, these beliefs become objects of study
rather than informing principles of the scholarship. It is as if Marsden
had discharged his obligation to his "point of view" simply by
announcing it, and can now proceed on his way without being unduly
influenced by its values. "It is perfectly possible," he asserts, "to
have strong evaluative interests in a subject, and yet treat it fairly
and with a degree of detachment."

But it is possible to detach yourself from a "strong evaluative
interest" only if you believe in a stage of perception that exists
before interest kicks in; and not only is that a prime tenet of
liberal thought, it is what makes possible the exclusionary move of
which Marsden, McConnell, and Carter complain. If such a base-level
stage of perception does in fact exist, it can be identified as the
common ground in relation to which uncommon-that is, not
universally shared-convictions (like, for example, Christ is risen) can
be marginalized and privatized. By claiming to have set aside his
strongly held values in deference to the virtue of fairness-a virtue
only if you are committed to the priority of procedure over substance-
Marsden agrees to play by the rules of the very ideology of which his
book is in large part a critique.

He is still playing by those rules in a concluding postscript in which,
he tells us, his own interest, hitherto not strongly in play, will be
elaborated. He now adds himself to the list of those who complain that
"the only points of view . . . allowed full academic credence are those
that presuppose purely naturalistic worldviews." The resulting exclusion
of religious perspectives, he explains, was justified by the supposed
objectivity and neutrality of naturalistic descriptions, but since post-
structuralism and postmodernism have denied the claims of any discourse
to be objective and neutral, "there seems no intellectually valid reason
to exclude religiously based perspectives." This, however, is a self-
defeating argument because it amounts to saying that when it comes to
proof, religious perspectives are no worse off than any other. It is an
argument from weakness-yes, religious thought is without objective
ground, but so is everything else; we are all in the same untethered
boat-and if a religious perspective were to gain admittance on
that basis, it would have forfeited its claim to be anything other
than a "point of view," a subjective preference, a mere opinion. It
would have joined the universe of liberal discourse but at the price of
not being taken seriously. If a religious perspective is included
because there is "no intellectually valid reason" to exclude it, neither
will there be any intellectually valid reason to affirm it, except as
one perspective among others, rather than as the perspective that is
true, and because true, controlling.

That is what Marsden should want: not the inclusion of religious
discourse in a debate no one is allowed to win, but the triumph of
religious discourse and the silencing of its atheistic opponents. To
invoke the criterion of intellectual validity and seek shelter under its
umbrella is to surrender in advance to the enemy, to that liberal
rationality whose inability even to recognize the claims of faith has
been responsible for religion's marginalization in the first place.
Marsden wants to argue against that marginalization, but his suggestion
for removing it is in fact a way of reinforcing it. He calls it
"procedural rationality." The procedure is to scrutinize religious
viewpoints and distinguish between those that "honor some basic rules of
evidence and argument" and those that "are presented so dogmatically and
aggressively as not to be accommodated within the procedural rules of
pluralistic academia."

One could hardly imagine a better formula for subordinating the
religious impulse to the demands of civil and secular order. Presumably
it will not be religion that specifies what the rules of evidence and
argument to be honored are; and it surely will not be religion that
stigmatizes as dogma any assertion that does not conform to the
requirements of those rules. Dogma, of course, is a word that once had a
positive meaning: it meant the unqualified assertion of a priori truths
and was indistinguishable from a truly strong religiosity. It is only
under the liberal dispensation that dogma acquires the taint of
obdurateness, of a culpable refusal to submit to the test of
reasonableness as defined by the standards and norms of the civil
establishment.

It is no accident that Marsden here begins to speak of the "enforcement
of rules of civility," of rules that protect the flow of conversation
from those who would bring it to an authoritative conclusion, for in
spite of his profession of religious faith, civility has become his
religion. When civility is embraced as a prime value, tolerance and
freedom cannot be far behind, and it is in the name of this
quintessentially liberal trinity that Marsden makes his appeal in the
closing pages of a book that began by invoking the will of God.

In the end Marsden's own argument enacts the journey he has been
describing, from a religious conviction so strong that it requires no
justification to a religious impulse so weakened that he can say of it,
without any irony, that it poses "scarcely any danger" to the ideal of
"free inquiry." On the back of the jacket cover one prepublication
reviewer predicts that "George Marsden's book will raise hackles." It is
not clear whether that is an expression of anxiety or hope; what is
clear is that whichever it is, it will not be realized.

What does it all mean? What can we conclude from these examples of three
intelligent and learned men who lament the trivialization of religious
discourse at the hands of liberal rationalism, but who turn to the
vocabulary of that same rationalism when it comes time to offer remedies
and alternatives? One thing we can conclude is that in the end
McConnell, Carter, and Marsden are moved more by what they fear than by
what they desire. What they desire is the full enfranchisement of
religious conviction. What they fear is the full enfranchisement of
religious conviction, for if the religious impulse were unchecked by the
imperatives of civility, tolerance, and freedom of inquiry, the result
would be the open conflict the Enlightenment was designed to blunt.

It is simply too late in the day to go back; as a member of one of
Carter's audiences put it, "We already had the Enlightenment" and
religion lost. The loss is not simply a matter of historical fact: it is
inscribed in the very consciousness of those who live in its wake. That
is why we see the spectacle of men like McConnell, Carter, and Marsden,
who set out to restore the priority of the good over the right but find
the protocols of the right-of liberal proceduralism-written in the
fleshly tables of their hearts.

Stanley Fish is Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor
of Law at Duke University, and also Executive Director of Duke
University Press. His latest book is Professional Correctness:
Literary Studies and Political Change (Oxford University
Press).